Abstracts

Max Weber Studies Vol. 2 No. 1 (November 2001): 41-58

The Spirit of Capitalism Revisited:

On the New Translation of Weber's Protestant Ethic (1920)

Stephen Kalberg

Various problems with the translation of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism by Talcott Parsons are discussed (for example, translation errors, the lack of a standardized terminology, the substitution of a ‘Parsonian’ vocabulary). Passages from his translation are then compared to passages from my recent translation. A concluding section summarizes major features of the new translation.